S.F. ranked-choice mess looms for mayor's race

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, March 10, 2011

We may be headed for a ballot box train wreck. November's election will technically be the first mayoral election to be decided by controversial ranked-choice voting. (Gavin Newsom was essentially unopposed when he was re-elected mayor.)

Today's Chamber of Commerce survey shows that voters find ranked-choice confusing and unsettling and would prefer a traditional two-candidate runoff. There's even been talk of repealing ranked-choice voting at the ballot box.

Good luck with that.

Voters approved ranked-choice voting in 2002. It eliminates a runoff by allowing voters to list their top three choices. If no candidate wins more than half of the votes, last-place candidates are eliminated and their second- and third-place votes are redistributed until someone wins a majority.

While confusing, the system has stuck so far and it will almost certainly take a ballot box meltdown to galvanize voters - a crazy, unexpected outcome that leaves voters feeling bewildered and disenfranchised. If that's what you want, the good news is all the factors - huge unwieldy field, no clear favorite, and lots of recognizable names with strong core support - are in place for that to happen.

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The Oakland mayoral election used ranked-choice voting and Jean Quan defeated former state Sen. Don Perata even though Perata had more first-place votes. The last District 10 supervisor's race, in which it took more than 20 rounds to award the seat to Malia Cohen, who was back in the pack when the counting started, seemed odd.

But November's election for a new mayor could be a much bigger deal.

"It's going to be District 10 on steroids," said political analyst David Latterman, who is advising mayoral candidate David Chiu. "There were really only three candidates in Oakland. This will be a race of several major candidates, maybe as many as 20, and at least 10 are legit contenders."

A landslide of candidates may be the new winning metric for ranked-choice voting. Candidates round up as many choices as possible, build coalitions, and then gang up against the front runners.

"I'm not sure I would want to be in first place going into the election," said political consultant Mark Mosher, who is working with candidate Dennis Herrera. "You're going to get absolutely shelled."

"One of the things I don't like is you have people putting together teams to eliminate the front-runners," he said. "Is this a ballot or a board game?"

Steven Hill, the writer and political thinker, has been called the architect of ranked-choice voting in California. His support hasn't wavered.

"In every election there are losers," Hill said. "And rather than look in the mirror, they say it was this crazy system that kept them from winning."

Hill sees a stately, orderly process in November that will save the city millions by avoiding a runoff election.

Hill does caution those who think they can sneak into the mayor's office with a lot of second- and third-place votes.

"I think there are several candidates who are going to experience a real exercise in humility," Hill said. "While the winner is going to need broad-based support, he or she is also going to need strong core support."

In fact, he says, he calculates that ranked choice has been used in 47 elections and in all but three of them - the Oakland mayor's race and San Francisco supervisor races in District 10 and District Two - the person who was initially in first place ended up winning.